We kept things pretty basic for the testing portion of this review. We ran ATTO and HDTach on the drive to see how it compares to other drives we've tested in the past. We don't have direct ATTO numbers for comparison, but we've compared HDTach to the A-Data PD7 mentioned earlier as well as the SuperTalent Pico drive.

ATTO Performance

The ATP 4GB ToughDrive does a fine job according to ATTO. Once the file size hits 512K blocks, the read performance maxes out at over 30,000 MB/sec. The write speed hits its peak around 128K block size.

We then fired up HDTach and ran the "Full" benchmark including the write test in order to see how the drive performs from start to finish. On flash based storage there should be no difference in performance from the first block to the last, but on mechanical storage this does indeed become a factor.

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The drive performed quite well all by itself, but let's compare how it stacks up to some other drives.

It never came in first, but it didn't come in last either. The A-Data PD7 is a blistering fast drive in both read and write tests and the ToughDrive can almost keep up in the reading department. When writing, it pulls a respectable 15.8MB/sec speed - 5.2MB/sec faster than the SuperTalent Pico, but 6.6MB/sec slower than the PD7. All-in-all it's a decent drive. . . but wait, there's more! (on the next page)